Editor Charles H. Smith's Note: One of a number of solicited responses published in the July
1899 issue of The Young Man. Original pagination indicated within double brackets. To link
directly to this page connect with: http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S568AA.htm

IV. By Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace.

[[p. 223]] Although
I quite sympathise with Mr. William Clarke's powerful statement of the indications
of moral deterioration that meet us everywhere to-day, yet I do not accept
all his premises nor agree with his somewhat pessimistic conclusion. He tells
us that he believes in the necessary decline and death of nations as of individuals,
apparently on account of the [[p. 224]]
somewhat forced analogy between the social and the individual organism. Yet a
little further on he points out that the civilisation of our country is almost
identical with that of the rest of Europe and of America, and that the indications
of deterioration, as of progress, are alike in all. It is therefore not a question
of the decay and death of England or of any other nation, but of civilisation
itself, that we have to deal with, and to my mind there are no indications whatever
of such a catastrophe, nor the least evidence or even indication that it will
ever occur.

The proofs of deterioration dwelt upon by Mr. Clarke are the growth of gambling, the vast
extension of the factory system, the enormous increase of millionaires and the money power, and
the immoral greed of kings and governments in their struggle for the partition of the uncivilised
world. With every word that he says on these subjects I agree, and I have to the best of my ability
set forth similar views in a recently published volume, and have further enforced the doctrine of
deterioration they imply by a body of unimpeachable facts taken from the successive
Reports of the Registrar-General. I have shown that insanity is increasing in a far greater ratio
than the population, even after the fullest allowance for those causes of apparent increase by
which the Lunacy Commissioners and medical writers attempt to explain away the increase.
Suicide, again, has increased at a still greater rate during the last thirty years, and, as this is a
form of insanity, it supports the reality of the former increase. Notwithstanding the growth of the
temperance movement, it will startle most persons to learn that deaths from alcoholism and
delirium tremens have increased nearly seventy per cent. faster than the population in the last
thirty years, and that such deaths have increased much faster in women than in men. Another and
even more terrible indication of deterioration is the large and steady increase during the same
period of premature births and congenital defects in children. As might be expected with such a
state of things, our prison population--including those in reformatories--has increased fifty per
cent. faster than the population, notwithstanding all the efforts of official apologists to prove the
contrary. And, lastly, the deaths in public institutions (workhouses, hospitals, etc.) have steadily
increased during the same period, till they now amount, in London, to twenty-seven per cent. of
the total deaths. And perhaps the most terrible feature of all is, that in all these cases the rate of
increase is itself increasing, so that we are going downhill now much faster than we were ten,
twenty, or thirty years ago.1

Now, surely these glaring proofs of physical deterioration afford the strongest confirmation
of the reality of that moral degeneration which Mr. Clarke as so forcibly set forth. Yet I wholly
disagree from his gloomy outlook. For, along with this moral and its resulting physical
deterioration there are undoubted signs of moral advance. True humanity is increasing
everywhere, and the conscience of the nation is being stirred as it never was before. The people
are everywhere better than their rulers, better than the land and wealth grabbers. And so far from
there being no "commanding vision," no generous faith in great causes, I doubt if there has ever
been so much of both. The rapid and irresistible spread of socialism in every civilised country,
destroying national antagonisms and introducing a true brotherhood of labour throughout the
world, is a fact of the highest importance. It permeates every class of society; it absorbs the best
intellect of the workers, and is yearly gaining converts from our great national universities, from
the liberal professions, and from the Church itself; and it has this advantage over all previous
attempts at reform, that it does not deal merely with symptoms or with the machinery of
government, but goes down to the very roots of all the evils which afflict our civilisation. And
this great cause is upheld and guided by that very "commanding vision" the supposed absence of
which Mr. Clarke deplores. It is taught by Carlyle and Ruskin, by William Morris and Lewis
Morris, by Edward Bellamy and Robert Blatchford, and by that truest saint and greatest seer now
living--Leo Tolstoi.

Truly, we will not despair of the Republic of Humanity.

Note Appearing in the Original Work

1. For the figures and authorities for all these statements, see The Wonderful Century, chap. xx.